[arch-general] [arch-dev-public] [extra] repository cleanup

[Heiko Baums]

Am Sat, 13 Nov 2010 10:18:02 -0500
schrieb Loui Chang <louipc.ist at gmail.com>:

> Sorry, Heiko. I don't think you properly understand Arch culture here.
> If you want something done you are expected to contribute and put
> forth your own effort to make it happen. The TUs and Devs cannot be
> expected to be your personal support team and maintain hundreds of
> packages that you're particularly interested in unless you're willing
> to compensate them for their time. Their time is much more valuable
> than that.

I don't speak about "my personal support team". If there are a few
packages I personally like to use which are not in the repos I don't say
anything. I always used packages from AUR and I never said anything
against it. But if those packages are getting more over time (in my
personal case it was from less than 50 to now more than 100 in 3 years),
because they are just moved from the binary repos to AUR, and if there
are packages which are not really unimportant - not only from my
personal point of view, and I'm not using all of those packages which
shall be moved to AUR now - then I say something, because I don't think
that this is right development of a distro.

And the importance of a package is not measured by how much some
developers or one single user are interested in or using it. It's rather
measured by how many users are using them, how popular they are, by how
many other projects they are recommended etc. Just a few examples.

And some of these packages which shall be moved to AUR are e.g. on the
list of recommended applications in the Xfce wiki. I don't think that
those packages are so unimportant.

So it's not my personal preferences. I try to see it from a quite
objective point of view.

And I have nothing against cleaning up a repo. But this should be done
more considered. Means only unimportant, unpopular packages or packages
which don't run anymore should be moved to AUR or removed completely but
not packages which likely belong to the most popular ones.

Heiko